ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Quadratic equation

Hi there! Today I am going to explain to you what is a quadratic equation in a way that a 5-year-old would understand.

Okay, so let's pretend you are playing with some toys, and you have some little square blocks. You can put them together to make a bigger square or rectangle, right? Well, let's say you have 5 blocks and you want to make a square. If you put them in a line, it won't be a square, it will be a line of blocks. But if you put them in a square shape, it will be a perfect square!

Now, let's imagine you have more blocks, say 10 blocks. You can still make a square with them, but it will be bigger than the first square you made, right? And if you have even more blocks, let's say 15 blocks, you can still make a square with them, but it will be even bigger than the other two squares.

Now, the quadratic equation is just like that. It's a way to find out how many blocks you need to make that perfect square. But instead of blocks, we use numbers. The quadratic equation helps us find the solutions to an equation that has an "x^2" term in it.

So, imagine you have an equation like this: "x^2 + 5x + 6 = 0". This equation is like a puzzle, and we want to solve it by finding what x is. When we use the quadratic equation, we are finding the answer to the question "how many blocks do I need to make a perfect square?"

So, to solve this equation, we use a formula that looks like this: (-b ± √(b^2-4ac)) / 2a. It may look a bit scary, but it's not that complicated once we understand what each part of the formula means.

The "a" in the formula is just the number in front of the x^2 term (so, in our equation, it's 1). The "b" is the number in front of the "x" term (so, in our equation, it's 5). The "c" is the constant term (so, in our equation, it's 6).

Now, we just plug those numbers into the formula and solve it. We would get two possible answers for x, because of the "±" sign. These two answers would be the sides of the square - basically, they tell us how long each side of the square needs to be to fit all the blocks.

So, there you have it: the quadratic equation is just a way to find out how many blocks (or numbers) we need to make that perfect square!